Afghanistan's agony seems
endless. Thousands of Afghans are starving. Hundreds of thousands have
become internal refugees after two years of terrible draught and famine.
Three million Afghans remain refugees in Pakistan and Iran.

Enraged by Afghanistan's sheltering
of Osama Bin Laden, the US has imposed punishing sanctions and near-total
isolation on this shattered nation.

Russia is infiltrating troops and
weapons into northern Afghanistan. India, China, and the Central Asian
states have allied against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban movement in Kabul.
Almost every hand is raised against Afghanistan, which continues
to suffer and bleed after 22 years of war.

So what does Taliban's leadership
do?just as the world's 1.2 billion Muslims are observing the holy month
of Ramadan?

Like the legendary Don Quixote de
la Mancha, who tilted at windmills, believing them evil giants, Taliban's
leader, Mullah Omar, proclaimed al l-out war against two 1,500-year old
statues of the Buddha carved into sandstone cliffs in Bamiyan province.
He ordered them destroyed forthwith. These towering idols, 175 and
120 feet high, are the most impressive relics of Afghanistan's pre-Islamic
era, when much of the population was Buddhist.

As Taliban soldiers blasted away
at the statues with heavy machine guns and explosives, the world pleaded
with the Islamic Don Quixotes of Kabul to halt their vandalism.
But Taliban's fierce mullahs refused to be deterred from their jihad against
idolatry, though they agreed to a temporary delay. Islamic
strictly bans any form of idols and their worship. This has led many Sunni
Muslims to oppose all religious artifacts and ban depiction of the human
form in art.

The notoriously stubborn Afghans
refused to heed worldwide pleas, including from the UN, many Muslim
nations, and Islamic leaders, to spare the statutes. Taliban rejected
offers by museums to buy the Buddhas. `We must strike down idolatry,'
thundered Kabul's later-day Savanarolas.

Muslims in general, and Taliban,
in particular, have an uncanny knack for negative public relations.
Think of the bloodcurdling but empty threats made in 1967 by the PLO's
windbag spokesman, Ahmad Shukairy: `we are going to drive the Jews into
the sea.' Such ludicrous bombast gave Israel a perfect pretext to
attack its Arab neighbors. Of Col. Khadaffi's clownish threats,
and Saddam's `Mother of All Battles' that turned into a catastrophe.

Taliban ended anarchy in Afghanistan,
brought peace to 90% of the country, largely halted the opium poppy
trade, and is holding off Russian attempts to infiltrate
northern Afghanistan. In spite of these important accomplishments,
the rural clerics, rustic mountaineers, and religious seminarians who make
up Taliban have managed to incur the wrath of the outside world by foolish
acts of medievalism, such as forcing women to go veiled from head to toe,
stoning alleged adulterers, and, now, in the supreme act of demented anti-public
relations, blowing up the giant Buddhas.

It should be noted Taliban is not
the world's only destroyer of religious sites or art. The greatest
destruction of religious and laic art in our era occurred under Chairman
Mao during China's Cultural Revolution. In Bosnia and Kosova, Serb forces
blew up large numbers of old mosques and Muslim shrines, without a peep
of protest from the west. In 1992, Indian mobs, incited by Hindu extremists
of the now ruling BJP party, torn down an ancient Muslim mosque, the Babri
Masjid., and threatened to `cleanse' India of all Muslim-era holy places,
palaces, and artifacts.

Still, why would Taliban leaders
act in such a self-defeating and foolish manner?

First, to petulantly strike back
at the US, which is now punishing Afghanistan the way it did with Iraq,
and, in league with Russia, trying to overthrow Taliban.

The Buddha outrage reminds be of
my godfather, a Balkan nobleman and soldier of fortune, who married a Spanish
duchess. Whenever they had a fight, which was often, he used to take his
favorite .45 automatic and shoot her collection of priceless Majollica
ceramics. As each plate exploded into fragments, the count roared with
laughter while the duchess screamed in horror and agony.

Second, as the result of a power struggle inside Taliban between isolationist
and more moderate factions. The former says `to hell with the outside
world?we defeated the Soviet Union and won't be told what to do by anyone.'
The moderates urge better relations with the west and Afghanistan's nervous
neighbors. Washington's intensifying war against Taliban has emboldened
the extremists and sidelined the moderates.

Pakistan, Taliban's main supporter,
along with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, has only limited influence over Taliban's
hardliners. Islamabad has been repeatedly frustrated in attempts to soften
Kabul's policies and image. In fact, no one has much influence over Taliban's
wildmen, who pride themselves, in true Afghan style, in rebuffing
all outside pressure, as the refusal to hand old comrade-in-arms Osama
Bin Laden to the Americans shows. The Afghans fear no one, a fact that
infuriates the great powers who are unused to having a small nation thumb
its collective nose at them.

However wanton and stupid, the destruction
of the Bamiyan statues should not divert us from the fact that Russia is
steadily reasserting its influence in strategic Afghanistan. No matter
how unlikeable, Taliban remains Afghanistan's only legitimate government
and the sole bulwark against Russian southern expansion.